“The challenge for the CMO is dealing with self-educated buyers. These are the smart, resourceful, and socially connected consumers who do their own research before ever entering the formal channels of a vendor’s marketing and selling apparatus,” said Rich Vancil, IDC Group Vice President in a press release. “In the wake of all of their self-education is a stream of data that the CMO will have to understand.”

A CMO’s responsibilities is fast becoming a hot topic in the advertising industry. AdAge recently wrote, “Today’s CMO must deal not only with the complexities of marketing, organizations and social change, but understand, leverage and quantify the evolving array of media options.”

Below are IDC’s Top 10 predictions for CMOs in 2013:

• Prediction 1 – The C-suite (CEO, CFO, and COO) will demand that the CMO produce both a strategy and a plan for how market-driven data will significantly contribute to corporate objectives

• Prediction 2 – The CMO and the CIO will begin the year as functional peers and end the year as either friends or frenemies, and per the CEO, the CIO will become more actively involved with the CMO in all marketing automation decisions that have cross-functional implications

• Prediction 3 – The automation outlay could approach 10% of marketing’s discretionary budget in 2013, with two-thirds of the total outlay coming from marketing and one-third coming from IT; for “best practice” organizations, this will shift to 50:50 by 2014

• Prediction 4 – Even with their new partnership with the CIO, many CMOs will find that their positions are in jeopardy as they failed to produce a robust data analytics function — or even a game plan to get there

• Prediction 5 – Starting in 2013, after the CMO realizes that he/she does not have the skill sets in place for data analytics proficiency, 50% of new marketing hires will have technical backgrounds

• Prediction 6 – Eight out of ten companies will report that most social media initiative growth is taking place outside of marketing

• Prediction 7 – By the end of 2013, 5% of CMOs will shift to a “mobile first” strategy

• Prediction 8 – Content isn’t king — it’s a wild beast; In 2013, CMOs will be pragmatic, shifting focus less on big platform projects and more on linking access to audience needs

• Prediction 9 – The demand for greater insight into the revenue impact of marketing and sales will require that older CRM systems be replaced, creating infrastructure disruption

• Prediction 10 – High-tech pipeline conversion metrics will continue to improve; expect a 20% improvement in target-to-deal ratios and a 10% reduction in time to create a customer, with both due to better automation and analytics-driven process improvement

I am a career entrepreneur, business strategist, and creative director with a passion for emerging platforms in the digital media and marketing space. I believe that creativity is the most valuable resource on the planet.
As president and founder of /newsrooms, I am responsible for strategic and creative teams that generate social media content and marketing conversion for companies intent on leading in their business categories.